About the same time Kelly started drawing her daily comic strip, Christian started work on a Betty Blonde graphic novel.  He filled an entire sketch book with his story, but it was pretty rough in terms of how it was drawn.  Since then, he took a little bit of a hiatus to work on our ham radio, study C++ programming, and knit his Ubuntu scarf.  A couple of days ago, he decided to start the big effort to draw and ink the story in preparation for publishing it in PDF form as a graphic novel.  He only has about a third of the story written so far, all of which needs to be redrawn and inked, but it is coming out great.  It has a completely different feel to it than Kelly’s comic that is just as fun, but equally as crazy.

The whole concept of a comic featuring Betty Blonde, Spike, Big Wilma, and Mr. Nobody started with a magazine the kids started all on their own.  They got the idea they would like to make a magazine, so they started writing articles, drawing pictures, and putting it all together with Microsoft Publisher.  They called their magazine Kaktus Kids.  I had absolutely nothing to do with it.  So, Betty Blonde is not just Kelly’s invention, but a joint venture.  Here are the three issues we put up on the web in PDF format:

The layout of the comic will be quite a bit different from Kelly’s daily strip.  I scanned in the first four panels and used the program I used to format Kelly’s comic so I could put together an example of Christian’s work.  The Graphic Novel format will feature nine panels per page laid out in a 3×3 grid.  The panels will be larger, to print out nicely on 8½x11 inch paper.  I will have to add some functionality to my BleAx comic strip accumulation program to be able to automatically put Christian’s comic panels together in the format we like.  We think this might be a project that will take about a year to complete because we have so many other things we need to do in parallel, but it is starting our very nicely, so we are very excited about it. 

We have agreed to try the two read alouds along for awhile to see how it goes.  We will do a week or two of only the broadcast book first, though, to give Christian and I a chance to finish assembling the radio.